Patch 4.12 notes

Welcome to patch 4.12! With only a few patches between now and the League of Legends World Championships, our focus is on the competitive scene and the things we can do to ensure the landscape is diverse and healthy. Part of how we’re accomplishing this goal is to look at champions who are skewing champion select in one way or another while also looking to healthy “almost there” champions, like Alistar or Ahri. For either side (strong or weak champions), our main philosophy is to look for strengths to highlight while also emphasizing weaknesses. This ensures a champ can hold onto their strategic value while still havingmeaningful tradeoffs. You’ll also hear me repeat this many times. Too bad.

For you Twisted Treeline fans, we’ve got two item overhauls with Grez’s Spectral Lantern and The Lightbringer (they’re now two separate item lines with different functionality), so be sure to read up before hopping into your 3s game.

Final thing: we’ll also be shipping jungle timers with patch 4.12! Read just below for a rundown on those but, as part of our focus on gameplay clarity, we want to ensure that the right skills are being rewarded in League of Legends. In the case of jungle timers, we want to focus on the meaningful choices you make with the information you’ve earned, rather than the quick arithmetic you can do with the clock. Also be sure to read our dev blog on Clarity for more philosophy!

And that’s it for now! Read up on the changes below, and we’ll see you next patch!

Chris “Pwyff” Tom

Jungle Timers

We want League to be all about the smart decisions you make in the moment and how you make plays around those moments, rather than how well you can track certain timers. There’s definitely skill in memorizing information, but our philosophy on gameplay clarity is making sure that skillful decisions can be made with the rightinformation and that players are fighting each other, not the system.

The information you get through clearing an objective is important stuff you’ve already earned, so we wanted to clarify that through jungle timers. It’s also worth mentioning that jungle timers aren’t adding new information that hasn’t been there before, as they follow the same rules as minimap icons.

Jungle timers have been added to the game!

Jungle timers currently track the next spawn time of: enemy / team Elder Lizard, enemy / team Ancient Golem, Dragon, and Baron

Timers will only start tracking a camp if you or a teammate directly witness a monster camp being fully cleared (similar to minimap icons)

If you manage to snipe Baron or Dragon without vision, the timer will set itself off

You can access jungle timers by pressing TAB (default key) through the scoreboard. They’ll be at the top of the screen.

We’ve also updated monster minimap icons! Check them out!

Champions

Ahri’s a cool fox gal that we’d like to see more of, but she’s currently sitting just below the top-tier mid picks. That said, we don’t think she needs too many buffs to keep up, so we focused on her ability to push the wave more efficiently so she can find more opportunities to roam.

Q – Orb of Deception

Ali’s mana costs are lower, and his ult now reduces tons of damage, even at lower levels. In exchange, Ali’s jungling is weaker.

We really want to bring Alistar back up as a support, but our challenge has been to make sure he doesn’t also take up his crown of jungling cow king from the days of old. Access to a ‘mini’ Malphite Unstoppable Force at level 2 (via his Headbutt + Pulverize combo), combined with guaranteed tower dives and the ability to punt people away from safety makes for a pretty oppressive gank-train from the jungle. We want to give Ali the things he needs to succeed but, like we did with Maokai, we also want to make sure he’s in a healthy position to do so. There’s a little concern that having 70% damage reduction at level 1 Unbreakable Will might make Alistar a little too good at tower diving (even as a support), but we’ll see how these changes affect him first.

Passive – Trample

REMOVEDJUNGLE COWNo longer deals double damage to monsters

Q – Pulverize

STUNNING LANDINGPulverize now correctly matches its visuals by applying a 1.5 second knockup⇒ 1 second knockup followed by a 0.5 second stun (functionally should remain the same)

COST70/80/90/100/110 mana⇒ 65/70/75/80/85 mana

W – Headbutt

COST70/80/90/100/110 mana⇒ 65/70/75/80/85 mana

R – Unbreakable Will

NEWYOU CAN’T MILK THOSEDamage reduction now applies instantly, rather than after the spell animation

E – Judgment

W’s cooldown has gone up, Force Pulse slows for a lot but for a shorter period of time.

This guy. Again.

Currently, our focus is on Kass’s super snowballing potential where, when he’s ahead, he can help both himself and his team succeed by constantly slowing and punching people in the face. We still don’t want to go after Kass’s iconic Riftwalk (as that’s clearly his core strength), but these changes mean Kass will have less offensive windows to go in.

Q – Taste Their Fear

Lucian’s attack ranges have gone down, but E’s cooldown will now get reduced with every hit from Lucian’s passive. E also has no mana cost, so Lucian will be dashing quite a bit in the mid to late game.

Our design philosophy when approaching a strong champion is to highlight their strengths while also emphasizing their weaknesses (I told you we’d be repeating this a lot). This mostly relates to the concept ofmeaningful choices, where we want that champ to maintain their strategic value while also having some tradeoff that enemies can play against. Specifically for Lucian, his high generic power (a strong early and late game, high burst, high mobility, etc) meant he could just be blindly picked without much consideration for the enemy team. For a while, this is what made Lucian such a strong competitive pick – he could adapt to any team and could still perform well.

Ultimately our changes are focused on highlighting some of Lucian’s strengths as a spell-slinging, mobile marksman, while also emphasizing new weaknesses – like having a lower range. At higher levels with some items (cooldown reduction!!!), Lucian can fluidly chain Es together as long as he has a target to hit with his passive. This also means Lucian will be one of the most mobile mid-range ADCs in teamfights (there are some concerns that he’ll be… too mobile thanks to E removing all slows, but we’ll keep a close eye here). Having a lower range, however, also means Lucian will need to take more risks in order to get E’s cooldown back up, and he might have some tougher matchups during the laning phase (where before he could win almost any lane). This gives us a lot more space to emphasize Lucian’s unique traits, and we’ll be watching how he performs after these changes.

General

ATTACK RANGE550⇒ 500

BASE MOVEMENT SPEED330⇒ 335

BASE HEALTH470⇒ 500

BASE ATTACK DAMAGE49⇒ 52

Passive – Lightslinger

THE DOUBLE TAP RULEFixed a bug where sometimes Lightslinger would fail to kill a champion because it incorrectly predicted that the first shot would be enough and would use the second shot to last hit a minion. Lightslinger will now always follow the double tap rule by shooting a near-dead champion twice to secure the kill.

Q – Piercing Light

NEWFARMCIANPiercing Light now deals 75%⇒ 100% damage to minions

CAST RANGE550⇒ 500

COST60/65/70/75/80 mana⇒ 50/55/60/65/70 mana

E – Relentless Pursuit

NEWNOW WITH MORE RELENTLESSNESSCooldown is now reduced by 1 second per Lightslinger (passive) hit, doubles against enemy champions (2 second reduction per hit, 4 seconds total for a full passive proc)

NEWNOW WITH MORE PURSUIT60/45/30/15/0 mana⇒ 0 mana at all ranks

NEWSMOOTH SHOOTERLucian now resets his basic attack timer upon dashing

COOLDOWN18/16/14/12/10 seconds⇒ 14/13/12/11/10 seconds

REMOVEDCULLEDRelentless Pursuit no longer resets on kill during The Culling

Passive – Short Fuse

Items

Bloodthirster now gives even more life steal and the shield decays slower. The max shield, however, has been reduced, and Bloodthirster’s life steal is now unique (to itself).

We made Bloodthirster a bit generic when we reworked the passive to a shield, because its other stats (life steal and AD) could be nabbed via other items just as easily. These changes are to push Bloodthirster as the sustain / defense item for anyone who wants to pick up AD along the way. As an aside, the UNIQUE life steal on Bloodthirster means you can’t stack BTs for +40%/+60% extra life steal, but it’ll still stack with any other life steal items like Vamp Scepter, Blade of the Ruined King, Ravenous Hydra, etc.

Now builds out of B.F. Sword and gives 80 attack damage. We just re-stated the changes in a sentence.

We were a little safe with Essence Reaver because there are a few champions who can get crazy strong with a mana-focused item. After seeing it in the wild, however, Essence Reaver just wasn’t giving enough of a power spike for anyone building it, so we’re rectifying that to make it more attractive as a pickup.

Summoner Spells

Earlier in the season, we updated the visual and sound effects of our summoner spells. We’re happy with the changes, but in Exhaust’s case, we think combining the fidelity of our Exhaust update with the visual impact of old Exhaust gets us the best of both worlds.

CLARITYVsuals have been updated to improve readability

Howling Abyss

REMOVEDJungle Items

The following jungle items have been removed from the Howling Abyss:

Hunter’s Machete

Spirit Stone

Quill Coat

Spirit of the Ancient Golem

Spirit of the Elder Lizard

Spirit of the Spectral Wraith

Twisted Treeline

Fixing some bugs we found with Twisted Treeline, along with a small balance tweak for the Ichors, which are statistically very strong so we wanted to trim just a bit of their power.

Jungle Monsters

UNHEALTHY MONSTERSFixed a bug where all monsters (not just the big ones) were giving a regeneration sigil

Ichor of Rage

DURATION4 minutes⇒ 3 minutes

Ichor of Illumination

DURATION4 minutes⇒ 3 minutes

Spirit of the Ancient Golem

REMOVEDWARDING ACTIVEWard active ability has been removed for Twisted Treeline

NEWUNIQUE ACTIVENow has UNIQUE active Trap Detection: Covers a target area in a stealth-detecting mist that grants vision for 5 seconds and reveals enemies that enter it for 3 seconds (60 second cooldown)

UNIQUE ACTIVENow has UNIQUE active Trap Detection: Covers a target area in a stealth-detecting mist that grants vision for 5 seconds and reveals enemies that enter it for 3 seconds (60 second cooldown)

NEW The Lightbringer

CRITICAL VISIONCritical strikes now cause the target to bleed for an additional 90% of your bonus attack damage as physical damage over 3 seconds and are revealed for the duration of the bleed.

Intro Bots

Intro Bots is a new difficulty of Co-Op vs. AI designed for players brand new to League of Legends. In addition to changes to bot AI, there are a variety of tutorial-style features designed to help new players pick up some of League’s basic lessons over the course of a few games. Check out our dev blog to get the full scoop on how we’re approaching the onboarding experience.

Intro is now the default level of Co-op vs. AI for new players

Players above Summoner Level 10 will receive reduced IP/XP rewards and can’t earn their First Win of the Day bonus from the Intro Bots queue

New Audio Engine

Back in 4.7, we started a multi-patch process to ship files for our new audio engine. We’re happy to announce that process is now complete and the engine will be going live with 4.12! Our new audio engine brings a few immediate improvements, but more importantly will help us focus on providing a more immersive and engaging League of Legends experience moving forward. Check out our earlier post for more details!

Made improvements to stereo imaging and panning

Added proper support for Surround Sound

Made subtle improvements to audio clarity

Bugfixes

Smoothed out a few small delays when the item shop, options menu and death recap are opened for the first time in a match

Fixed a graphical bug with start-of-game tips

Fixed a bug that occasionally applied duo queue restrictions to queues other than ranked solo/duo

Players who have negative LP from dodging ranked queues can no longer automatically reset their LP to 0 with a single ranked win

Fixed a bug that occasionally caused players with low LP to be demoted when losing a ranked match that would drop them to 0 LP

Fixed an issue with ranked teams sometimes not being promoted after winning a promo series

Fixed an issue with players sometimes being unable to join a new ranked team after leaving another

Upcoming Skins

The following skins will be released at various times during Patch 4.12:

Founder of Geek Ireland and proud to be part of an awesome community. I'm a huge fan of online gaming, mainly League of Legends & World of Warcraft. My favourite content to consume en-mass is Sci-Fi like Star Trek and Star Wars. All hail Netflix!